If the Gospels Are a Fraud

If, tomorrow, you should establish that the New Testament writings are frauds, how would that change the minds of a single Christian?

I believe a lot of Christians would say "my faith is founded on lies", and cease to be Christians.

This is an interesting psychological point, but I believe that you generally are wrong. And example is the "salamander letter" purporting to show that the original account of the Mormon leader Joseph Smith's discovery of the gold tablets wasn't true. The church's reaction?

"The so-called 'Martin Harris letter' [the Salamander letter] is no repudiation of Joseph Smith, but rather probably is a further witness of the Prophet's own account of the discovery of the gold plates. (Deseret News, Church Section, Sept. 9, 1984)"

http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/trackingconfessions2.htm

Whenever indisuptable facts arrive on the scene, the church is quick to absorb those facts so long as they don't harm core dogmas. In this case, the facts turned out to be a fraud, and since the Smith writings where in themselves frauds, it was a fraud of a fraud. The key word is indisputable. Thus, despite the plethora of writings in the Bible that attest to a geocentric Ptolemaic cosmology, few Christians today believe that the earth is flat. Not so, in the case of evolution vs. special creationism, where the only indisputable fact is doubt.

Mormonism and Christ

LDS theology is an interesting example of a kind of special pleading which I call for want of a better phrase hijacked pleading. The Mormon's public view of Jesus Christ is on their web site.

http://www.lds.org/portal/site/LDSOrg

In it, we find the following:

Jesus Christ is the Only Begotten Son of God the Father in the flesh. He was the Creator, He is our Savior, and He will be our Judge. Under the direction of our Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ created the earth. Through His suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and by giving His life on the cross—that is, by performing the Atonement—Jesus Christ saves us from our sins as we follow Him. Through His Resurrection, Jesus Christ saves us from physical death. Because He overcame death, we will all be given the gift of resurrection.

The words the LDS site use are the same terms that you would hear from any Baptist pulpit. But, as a matter of Mormon doctrine, the words the Baptist understand have almost no correlation to the same words the Mormon understands. "Son of God", "atonement", "resurrection" , "incarnation", and "God the Father" are words that LDS theologians have radically redefined, as we see here.

http://www.probe.org/cults-and-world-religions/cults-and-world-religions/the-mormon-doctrine-of-jesus.html

I'm using the LDS only as an example of how all groups be they secular or sectarian define and re-define what we assume to be commonly understood words in such a way to advance dogma to the point where any kind of a cogent conversation is next to impossible on matters of conviction.